Sugarplum Whatever

Despite what my last post might suggest, I’m no longer the radical anti-Christmas ideologue I was as a child, when I sat stony-faced through Christmas carols and stomped out of stores if greeted with “Merry Christmas.” In fact, there are some aspects of the Christmas season that I quite enjoy. M, E, and I go on light drives to check out the displays in other neighborhoods. We love our friends’ Christmas trees (I feel the same way about Christmas trees that I feel about large breasts: I know that I could have them, but getting them would go against some of my basic principles, so instead I’m just fascinated by other people’s). And then there’s The Nutcracker.

One of the great pleasures of having girls should be putting them in party dresses and going to see The Nutcracker. Not my girls. After a bad Really Rosie experience at the age of two, M firmly rejected anything theatrical for years. I slowly eased her into children’s theater--Pooh was acceptable, and a Laura Ingalls Wilder play proved positively enjoyable. Finally, in London last spring, I persuaded her to go to the Northern Ballet Theatre’s astounding production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Sadler Wells. If that couldn’t convert her to theater, nothing could. Luckily, it did.

So finally, this year, we assayed The Nutcracker. There were little girls in velvet and tulle party dresses (not us, we don’t have that kind of dress, but we dressed up in our own ways). There were grandmothers (alas, ours don’t live around here). There were endless souvenirs, from little wooden nutcrackers to fairy headdresses (we already have fairy headdresses, thank you, and we try to stay away from overpriced souvenirs) (except at the circus a few weeks ago, where we went all out for an $8 slushee in an elephant cup and a $10 cotton candy in a ringleader top hat). There were Clara and Fritz and Victorian ball dresses and little children coming out of Mother Ginger’s skirt and Russian dudes highstepping during the dum-dididi-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum part, which is always my favorite.

It was The Nutcracker alright. But you know, it didn’t really do it for me.

Maybe I’ve gotten old--I remember a lot more kids in the party scene and the tree just didn’t seem to grow as big. Maybe Red State Capital City Ballet isn’t that great--the dancing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream made me wish I was a ballerina, but this didn’t. Or maybe The Nutcracker is just--dare I say it?--a little boring. The first act rocks. It’s got narrative; it’s got humor; in this production it even had a drunken grandmother and a little baby, which is always a plus for us. But the second half is another story. Like I said, Mother Ginger and the Russian dudes are swell, but then…well, there was a lot of rustling and whispering among the children in our balcony as the Sugarplum Fairy did her thing and the Arabian guys did their thing and the Dewdrop Fairy did her thing and the flowers did their thing. A few families even got up and left. After all, as a grumpy E complained, “I don’t want to watch this show anymore. It’s just dancing.”

[Postscript: The next day I asked E and M what they thought of The Nutcracker. E said, “I loved The Nutcracker. The Nutcracker was awesome.” She wants to be a Nutcracker for Halloween next year. M said, “It wasn’t as good as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it was still good.” Someday they’ll take their daughters to The Nutcracker, and that’s as it should be.]